The discourse model of ethics formulates the most general principles and moral intuitions behind the validity claims of a deliberative model of democracy. The basic idea behind this model is that only those norms (i.e., genera rules of action and institutional arrangements) can be said to be valid (i.e.morally binding), which would be agreed to by all those affected by their consequences, if such agreement were reached as a consequence of a process of deliberation that had the following features